The challenge

Richmond, a city in Contra Costa County, Calif., is one of the most toxic places in the United States. Homes and schools stand alongside Superfund toxic cleanup sites and adjacent to some 350 industrial facilities, including waste incinerators, oil refineries and pesticide, fertilizer and other chemical manufacturers. Like their African American and Latino neighbors, the area’s relatively recent Laotian refugees — 10,000 and growing — face high poverty rates, poor schools and violence. Many of their teenage sons have joined gangs.

Members of the Laotian community are particularly vulnerable to contaminated water and soil because they traditionally feed their families by fishing and growing their own vegetables. They are also vulnerable because of lack of access to information, services and decision makers. In addition, they face linguistic and cultural challenges within the Laotian immigrant community itself. Within Richmond alone, it includes at least six different ethnic groups, each with a distinct culture and language, some not written. Forty-one percent of Laotian families live in poverty nationally, a higher proportion than any other group in the United States, according to the 1990 Census report, the most recent available. In Contra Costa County, an estimated three in five Laotian families depended on Aid to Families with Dependent Children prior to welfare reform.


Seeds of commitment

Grace Kong is the daughter of immigrants. Her parents, while struggling to live day to day and provide for their family, taught her the core values of treating everyone with dignity and of working for a just and compassionate society for all people. Torm Nompraseurt was one of the first Laotian refugees to settle in the Richmond area. After working for 14 years as an interpreter and social service worker, Nompraseurt believes that the key to justice isn’t specific programs but bringing people together and offering them the tools to challenge decision makers. He is raising 11 children, including those of his brother and sister in law, who were killed in an auto accident. When the children were approached about joining gangs, Nompraseurt moved them away from Richmond for a year — commuting three hours each way. He moved back once he was sure that the children were able to resist gang pressure. May Phan, a refugee from Laos after the Vietnam War, endured great hardship to come to the United States, only to be discriminated against because of her race and ethnicity. She wants people in her community to be treated fairly and not discriminated against because of the color of their skin or how much money they make.


Accomplishments

In 1995, the Asian Pacific Environmental Network (A.P.E.N.) launched the L.O.P. to help members of the Richmond Laotian community struggle for environmental justice and social change. Among the organization’s community-building activities: conducting a survey project on contaminated seafood consumption, managing land available to Laotian families for communal gardening to ensure food security, and supporting political campaigns against anti-immigrant statewide initiatives. The group’s youth organizing arm, the Asian Youth Advocates (A.Y.A.), has worked with adolescents, especially girls, to develop leadership and environmental awareness. The teenagers have developed and administered surveys and have photographed, mapped and documented toxic hazards in their neighborhoods.

In 1999, a major chemical explosion at Richmond’s Chevron oil refinery revealed the county’s inadequate emergency response system, especially for limited-English-speaking residents. The county’s automated system communicated only in English, though it was capable of providing information in 125 different languages. Latino residents were informed about the disaster through Spanish radio and television, but no media existed to warn the Laotian community. In response, L.O.P.’s adult members challenged the County Board of Supervisors to instigate a multilingual phone alert system. When county administrators said the county had no money to establish the promised warning system, L.O.P. , working with other groups — including those representing Latinos — helped find the funding needed to implement the system.

L.O.P. collaborates with organizations representing other ethnic groups and also with environmental justice associations nationwide. In an effort to serve as a model for organizing similar communities across the country, L.O.P. recently completed a booklet about its successful fight for a multilingual disaster warning system, Fighting Fire with Fire: Lessons Learned from the Laotian Organizing Project’s First Campaign.


Their leadership style

The Mien, Lao and Khmu are the largest Laotian groups in the Richmond area. “In our community meetings, we see people from different tribal groups sitting together in the same room discussing community issues,” Kong, Nompraseurt and Phan wrote in a recent essay. “Back in Laos, you would almost never see this happening.” With such linguistic and cultural diversity within the Laotian community, communication is the key to the leadership style of the L.O.P. Nompraseurt participates on the boards of several Lao and Khmu community associations and can translate and interpret in four languages. Phan reaches out to the Mien community. Kong speaks no Laotian languages, but she serves as a strong role model for those community’s youth who speak English.
Facing linguistic and cultural barriers, L.O.P. makes savvy use of visual aids, including informative diagrams and maps, at public meetings. L.O.P.’s staff works to develop leadership in others, helping them learn how to speak in public and in front of media, host meetings, facilitate discussions and mobilize other community members. The L.O.P. leadership team also recruits women, seniors and youth, segments of the community under-represented in its traditional leadership. The organization has developed and nurtured leadership teams made up of active community members who meet monthly, or more often, to make decisions on L.O.P.’s direction. One leadership team is made up of adults, mostly elders, and another consists of youths who work to develop their own voice.


The future

L.O.P.’s current membership is primarily made up of elders and young women from different tribal and ethnic groups who are challenging the existing power dynamics affecting their community. In the future, the organization hopes to help bring the rest of the community into active involvement. The first phase of L.O.P.’s work has focused on building bridges between the different groups within the Laotian community, but now the group sees a need to deepen alliances with other groups, and to build a multi racial alliance against environmental racism. “While we have worked with groups in the African American and Latino communities in the past, we want to deepen this work to build relationships between our leaders and members, and to build long-term organizational relationships,” Kong, Nompraseurt and Phan wrote. “We strongly believe that it will take a multiracial alliance to truly change conditions on a grand scale. One community cannot stand alone in the fight for social justice
for all people.”


More about Torm Nompraseurt,Grace Kong and May Phan

“Most people in organizations like L.O.P. don’t take the time to lay out the lessons they’ve learned, so they can’t be passed along easily. But L.O.P.’s report, Fighting Fire with Fire, is considered a bible in how to do a successful campaign with a disenfranchised community. They explain how to mount a campaign that can be shared with others in a concise way, no matter where the other community work is happening. This has transported their experience and expertise in a way that they would not be able to do in person.”
— Karen Susag, Development & Community Association, Communities for a Better Environment

“I consider L.O.P.’s work history making. For a lot of the Southeast Asian communities, where this behavior is not necessarily encouraged, it is very important to have the model they are creating for participation in a democratic society, and for building multi ethnic unity. There aren’t a lot of progressive organizations such as this one in the Asian American community. What they are accomplishing will be a major contribution to building a truly multi ethnic agenda.”
— Pam Tau Lee, Labor Occupational Health Program and Founding Member of the Asian Pacific Environmental Network